Personally I would make a rum or whiskey to put into your new investment mate. A sugar wash isn't going to benefit much from being barrelled. BUT if you choose to I would choose a neutral wash from the T&P section and make nice tight cuts and theres no need for carbon filtering. Theres no substitute for good cuts. Then oak at 65ABV. Cheers

What are you distilling? Turbo, sugar head, all grain?You need to make cuts while you're distilling (read the beginners section) so you can keep and water down higher abv alcohol or you can filter it all at 40ish and then rerun it through a clean still and you should just get a higher abv product.Not sure how well neutral would go in a barrel but others here may have tried it. :handgestures-thumbupleft:

I'd look up some of the sugar recipes here like tpw or the kale one.Turbo's are 'Ok' (big apostrophes there) but need really good cuts to get rid of that metallic taste.You can get better results but usually a lower yield. Probably good for a practice and to know what they're like though.

Yep for sure jump on a TPW wash mate. Use lowans bakers yeast. All the info is for you there in the recipe in the tried and proven. It's cheaper to make then a turbo and with tight cuts its extremely clean. You want to put the best quality possible into the barrel so I would do a stripping run and then second spirit run.

But quickly...what still are you using mate? A base line rum or whiskey is quite easy to do...

Just go look for the CFW wash in the tried and proven section mate. A big box of cornflakes and I use 1/2 a small box of weetbix and lowans baking yeast. Try and keep the wash to around 1060 so you don't stress out the yeast. Now if your still can strip do enough stripping runs so you can fill the boiler with no higher than a 40% low wine wash and run that with tight cuts.

You may need to do a generation or two to get more flavour but the end results are proven and well worth the time to learn.

I think you're going to struggle to get flavour using a T500 which is designed to strip it out but using any one of the recipes in the tried and proven section and doing good cuts will get you spirits you don't need to filter so oaking at 65% would be possible. I agree with Sam though, it's going to be oaked vodka.

Try a corn flake whiskey wash that is easy to make & in a oak barrel it will improve over time.I would not bother filtering a neutral spirit run no point if it will be sitting in an oak barrel for 12months plus the bad stuff will evaporate over time through the barrel

I'm getting good results by doing 1.5 washes - you use wash to water down the stripped product.It may work on the t500, can't hurt to try - just run it as fast as possible to strip (without melting anything), on the spirit run run as normal for fores and heads, then faster for the rest, the hearts and tails will smear a bit, this is where you will get the flavour through, the hearts cuts probably won't be huge.Give it a go, the worst thing that could happen is you get some flavorless neutral or something to run again normally for neutral

Your fighting an uphill battle here sorry mate. The T500 is a reflux still you won't get much flavor out of it if any. If you want flavor I'd be more tempted not to do strip run, just do a single run. Don't push the T500 too hard or it will melt. You've got to push on with it now cause you've got the barrel but I'd be looking for a pot head to go on your boiler as soon as you can so you can make the most of the barrel.

I can't help but think that neutral in a barrel will just taste like wood but don't know. You could try a small amount of essence to help maybe? Oh and don't bother filtering if your doing cuts, you won't need to :handgestures-thumbupleft: